Ukraine Delays Debate on Key Soviet Treaty

The Ukrainian legislature voted Thursday to delay until autumn all debate on the proposed Union Treaty, which President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had hoped would win quick national approval and lay the political foundation for pulling the Soviet Union out of its crisis.

Despite efforts by Communist Party leaders to push the treaty forward and meet Gorbachev’s July deadline for signing it, the Ukrainian deputies voted overwhelmingly, 345-18, to defer consideration until mid-September, probably breaking the political momentum that the Soviet president had been building.

Leonid M. Kravchuk, chairman of the Supreme Rada, the Ukrainian legislature, said the treaty is so controversial in some of its basic concepts and has become so snarled with conflicting amendments that at least two months are needed for study and discussion.

Other republics, including the giant Russian Federation, are now likely to put off consideration of the treaty, which may not be signed before November or December. Like the Ukraine, the second most populous of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics, several have serious problems with the draft treaty and felt that they were being rushed into signing it.

Negotiating with the leaders of the nine republics likely to remain part of a reconstituted nation, Gorbachev had won agreement on the draft treaty. He urged that it be signed in late July, to be followed in half a year by a new national constitution, then by presidential and parliamentary elections.

That agreement is fraying quickly. On Wednesday, Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, said that differences in five areas, including the division of powers between the central and republic governments and the right of the central government to levy taxes, remain unresolved.

In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, Kravchuk was confronted Thursday by an estimated 5,000 nationalists protesting the treaty as a sellout of Ukrainian interests and calling instead for adoption of a new Ukrainian constitution affirming the republic’s sovereignty.

Barred at first from the area around the Parliament building, the demonstrators burst through police lines and were met by a volley of tear-gas grenades and a countercharge by riot troops with truncheons. The crowd was eventually allowed near the heavily guarded Parliament, however, where they chanted slogans against the Union Treaty and in favor of Ukrainian independence.

“Slogans will not help the Ukraine today,” Kravchuk told the demonstrators, bringing jeers of “Shame!” He continued: “Only reason and unity will help. We have to battle for sovereignty. But we will only win the battle when we stand on reason and law.”

Mary Mycio, a free-lance journalist in the Ukraine, contributed to this report.